Fic: Through the Winter chapter 12 (Cain/Gina)
Title: Through the Winter (12/?)
Author: phoenixstorm
Pairing: Cain/Gina
Rating: PG-13
Warning: A smidge of violence, vaguely implied rape.
Word Count: 5,056
Summary: What if Gina were a sleeper agent cylon?
( Summary page here if you're new to the fic.)
Chapter Twelve:
Thorne walked straight for Gina, his boots thumping heavily on the metal floor. One, two, three. On the fourth beat he bent so that he was face to face with Gina, and his right hand snapped out to grab her chin. He seemed completely oblivious to Helena and Gina forced herself to keep her eyes on his, fighting the powerful urge to look away and see if the admiral was going to attempt anything.
A flash of movement caught her attention and her eyes betrayed her, darting away from Thorne’s to peer over his shoulder. She snapped them straight back, but he’d already seen what she’d done. With a frown he started to turn but as he did so Helena’s hands were at his waist, and when he was only half way around Helena had managed to get the gun out and had it pressed to the back of his neck.
“You do not want to frak with me, toaster.” She warned him, and pressed the gun down harder. Gina’s breath caught in her throat as she watched Thorne tense up rather than relaxing the way she’d been hoping he would. Helena had been right about him.
“Last warning,” Helena’s words were sharp and with emphasis, “surrender and release us.”
Thorne closed his eyes and Gina started to inhale, but before she could manage a sigh of relief Thorne was moving, there was a gunshot, and then blood splattered across her face. She blinked in confusion as she watched Thorne’s body drop to the ground, and then she could see Helena again. She had a cold look on her face as she held her position for a moment, then she dropped the weapon and started sorting through Thorne’s pockets. Gina turned her head and tried to wipe some of the blood on her cheek off onto her shoulder, and wasn’t having much luck with that when she heard a light jingle and turned back to Helena who was holding what Gina hoped were the keys to her gods-cursed cuffs.
Helena undid the ones around her ankles first, and then walked over to remove the cuffs that had been binding Gina’s wrists and ankles for what seemed like an eternity now. With her arms finally free the first thing Gina did was throw them around Helena’s neck and pull her in for a quick embrace, but she knew that they didn’t have much time to spare so she let go quickly and then jumped to her feet. She grabbed Thorne’s gun from the floor and walked quickly to the entrance to their cell.
“It looks like the coast is clear, we should be able to...” Gina paused as she suddenly realised what she’d just done. She’d been kept in the same cramped sitting position for days now, and she’d jumped to her feet and walked over here with stumbling in the slightest. She could feel the ache in her legs and feel that they were both asleep, and yet she was walking as if she were completely fine. Her eyes shifted to the gun in her hands, and she gasped a little to realise that she was holding it as if she actually knew what she was doing.
Gina turned back to Helena, her lips parted as she shook her head slowly. It suddenly became a little difficult for her to breathe. She’d been fighting the knowledge for so long now, but blindly believing everything Helena told her without thinking wasn't working for her anymore. There was no logical reason to explain this away. None, except for...
I open my eyes, really open my eyes for the first time in a while. My face is being pushed into the ground by his boot on my head, and I know now. I know that this is my reality. It’s been my reality all along, and the realisation hurts more than the fact that it feels as if he’s about to crush my skull.
Helena’s not here with me. No one’s going to rescue me. I’m a cylon.
Admitting that to myself isn’t as hard as I’d have thought, but the pain has brought on a strange new sense of apathy. My memories may be false, my ‘people’ may have wiped out almost all of humanity, but I just can’t find it within myself to care.
Even with the apathy I still know that I don’t want this, and even if the other place is false I was still much happier there. If I can just manage to concentrate I may be able to...
Gina looked down at herself and smiled bitterly upon noticing that she was now in her standard clothes, complete with Integral Systems Engineering coat. If she was going to be in a false reality she might as well be rid of that horrible, scratchy dress.
“Gina, we don’t have much time.” Helena gripped her shoulder and the two of them left the cell. The sight of Helena, her false Helena, made Gina’s eyes start to water up. It upset her that the woman in front of her wasn’t real, but even more upsetting was the fact that she didn’t care. Reality or fiction, she just wanted to be with the woman she loved.
They checked the entrance to the brig carefully and then took cautious steps outside. Gina followed Helena’s lead even though she knew no one was going to find them, and tried to keep her attention focused on the brown hair and blue uniform she saw walking ahead of her. Without the complete conviction that this world was real it was getting harder for Gina to maintain it, especially since she was almost completely drained emotionally. Thorne’s visits had caused her a great deal of physical pain, and to cope she’d succumbed to what she could only call madness. Without that she now realised just how much Thorne had been mentally torturing her as well.
It started to eat into her fantasy world. Panels on the walls would blink in and out of existence and the length of the corridors kept changing, but still Helena was in front of her in perfect focus, and still Gina followed her.
It was hard to say how many corridors they’d walked down exactly, and when the walls started to get blurry as well Gina finally called out to Helena.
“I’m so tired,” she whispered when Helena had come back to check on her, and she closed her eyes to lean into the hand that was placed on her cheek.
“It’s okay Gina, we’re here.” Helena’s voice was soft and reassuring, and it gave Gina the strength to open her eyes and see the docking bay and the Raptor right in front of them. Its shape kept shifting but it was there, and Helena helped Gina up and sat her down in one of the seats. She sat there gasping for breath as Helena launched the Raptor into space, and when they were flying smoothly she came back to take the seat next to Gina.
”Where are we going?” Gina asked, letting her head fall down onto Helena’s shoulder.
A hand stroked Gina’s head. “We’re not going anywhere,” Helena said, and there was regret in her voice, “it would be too hard on you, so I’ve killed the engines. We’re just drifting.”
Gina chuckled softly. “Just like that story Lynelle told. Why did you do that to those two pilots?”
She was forced to open her eyes again when Helena turned and pulled her face up. “I’m not going to answer that,” she said, “because the real Helena never told you and I don’t want to tell you anything that’s not true.”
Her words caused Gina’s chest to tighten, and suddenly she was wrapping her arms around Helena and sobbing harder than she had before.
“I don’t want this to be the false world,” she cried out between gasped breaths, “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” Helena held her tightly and rubbed her back, and Gina’s sobs managed to fade as she laughed bitterly.
“I thought you said you wouldn’t tell me anything that wasn’t true.”
The jumping walls of the Raptor disappeared completely and she was left in a white space with Helena, who buried her fingers in Gina’s hair and then pulled her in for a kiss. Gina savoured it for as long as she could, but eventually she opened her eyes and saw the walls of her cell again, and a tear travelled down her cheek as Helena’s last words echoed in her head.
“But it is true. That’s the problem...”
She could hear Thorne zipping up his pants and refastening his belt, and then he pulled her up into a sitting position by her hair.
“You’d have to agree that I’ve been easy on you up until now, but the admiral is starting to get frustrated by my lack of results.” He bent to speak into her ear, then leaned back up and walked around so that he was standing about two metres in front of her. Gina watched him, consumed by the apathy again which at least allowed her to stare him in the eyes without flinching or looking away.
She just wanted this to end. She could no longer pretend that this wasn’t real and she no longer had the strength to pretend at all. All she had to look forward to in the future was pain, and more pain, and more pain. Some frakking machine she was. She vaguely wondered if the other human cylons would break under this kind of pressure, but once again she found that she didn’t care.
Zeus, Hera, Athena, she started to pray. Apollo, Artemis, Demeter, Ares, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Hades.
She blinked, turning her attention away from Thorne for a moment.
Hades, Hades. Of course. She knew what she had to do now.
Thorne was speaking again. “I think I’m going to have to try something new in order to get a response out of you.”
He removed his sidearm from his waist and aimed it at Gina’s right shoulder. She watched the barrel, hoping to the gods that cylons had better reflexes than humans.
“Every time I ask you a question and you don’t respond you get a hole. Now, tell me how many cylons there are out there.”
“Seventy-five frakking billion” she spat out, and Thorne shook his head at her.
“The only thing I like less than no response is a stupid response.” His finger tightened around the trigger and Gina was able to shift ever so slightly to the right before the bullet connected. However, the bullet didn’t hit her shoulder as Thorne has intended, but instead hit her above her right breast, puncturing a lung.
She collapsed to the ground gasping, feeling a sharp pain with every small breath. The bullet must have sent shards of rib into her lung as well, but even though this hurt far more than anything Thorne had caused her to endure earlier she still pulled her lips back into a pained but triumphant smile. Thorne saw it and swore, and ran out of the cell to the phone at the wall. Gina curled into a ball as she coughed up blood and watched him talking into the phone, her vision starting to go white at the corners. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but from the look on his face he seemed to be having an argument with someone. A chuckle brought up more blood as she realised that the ship’s doctor probably wasn’t too keen on the thought of holding off surgery on recovering crew members so that he could save some cylon. This couldn’t have gone better.
At some point Thorne slammed down the phone and looked back at her with his own version of triumph, but she didn’t have the energy to respond. Gina’s body still tried to draw in the short and sharp gasps of air that it could, and as her vision was starting to go entirely she spotted movement at the entrance to the brig which must have been the doctors or nurses coming to try and save her at last. She wasn’t worried though as she could feel herself slipping away.
Her suicide would be complete. Finally this nightmare would end.
Her eyelids fluttered shut.
---
A loud noise shocked her and a voice in Gina’s head screamed I can’t breathe! She threw herself upwards and thrashed around for a handhold so that she could keep herself upright. She leaned against the metal to her side and gasped in many deep breaths, her eyes closed as she savoured the air in her pain-free lungs.
When Gina had finally gotten her fill it suddenly dawned on her that she was submerged in a strangely thick liquid, and for the first time in days was able to move her arms. She lifted up her hands in front of her face, reminding herself what they actually looked like, and then as a final shock she discovered that she was also naked.
What was going on? Had the humans managed to save her after all? But where was she? She’d never seen any place like this before and she was fairly certain she’d seen all the Pegasus had to offer.
Something dropped on her head and obscured her vision, and when she reached up to remove the towel she spotted a very familiar face.
“Simon?” she cried in disbelief, knowing that her mouth was hanging open and not caring.
Simon smiled at her as he knelt down beside the tub Gina was currently submerged in. “Hello Gina,” he said in the same old voice she remembered from months ago, “I knew we’d meet again though I was hoping they’d be under different circumstances. I hope you don’t mind my asking how you died?”
“Died..?” Gina repeated, not remembering for a moment. Then, like a tidal wave, her last moments came back to her. The woman she loved had ordered her torture, and unable to endure it anymore she had moved so that her torturer’s bullet had stuck something vital rather than just her shoulder. She’d died in that cell, gasping for breath as her insides were ripped apart. So how could she be...wherever she was?
“Oh!” She exclaimed as she figured it out, “they...the humans I suppose, they got me to surgery on time and saved me, and now I’m mad and creating fantasy worlds again.”
Simon tilted his head and gave her the sympathetic look one gives a fool. “No, Gina, you died and downloaded back here in this resurrection ship. Since you said ‘the humans’ I’m assuming you switched on all right, so how could you not know about resurrection?”
“Resurrection?” She repeated him again, then raised a hand to her face and rubbed her forehead. “Inviere, resurrection, that frakking Lieutenant Shaw.”
Her head was pounding while trying to understand all of this. With the apathy gone she was starting to freak out again over the fact that she was a cylon, and apparently she had died and ‘resurrected’ now. Gina pulled the hand away to take a good look at the room she was in. It was mostly dark though the bright lights from the tub she was in were blinding her. The thick, almost glue-like substance she was in wasn’t helping her with this strange situation at all, so she pulled herself out of the tub and started to dry herself off with the towel Simon had given her.
Simon laughed at the sight. “You could have waited until I was gone. Sleeper agent or no, you’re as shameless as the rest of the Sixes.”
She ignored the dig, but then her head snapped over in his direction as she pieced together something else. On top of trying to deal with everything that had been happening to her she hadn’t wondered for a second what was going on with him.
“Simon...assuming that this isn’t another fantasy world and I’m not entirely convinced of that yet...are you a cylon as well?”
He managed to hold in this laugh and nodded instead. “I’m one of the fourth model cylons, but I was always awake. You were programmed to think that you were human because you were intended to go onto the Battlestar Pegasus, and even though your model are exceptional actresses the Ones felt that they didn’t want to risk someone like Admiral Cain becoming suspicious of our plans.”
Gina stopped drying herself and clenched her hands into fists around the towel. “You...you...’didn’t want to risk it?’ You did this to me because you thought Helena might clue on to the fact that you’re trying to wipe out her entire species? You made me think I was human, gave me an entire history so that you could use me to betray the woman I love?”
“Gina, Gina, you can’t love her. You were programmed to gain her trust, that’s all.”
“Which I could have done simply by being good at my job!” Gina yelled at him, throwing the towel in his face as hard as she could. “But I’ll bet you never said I had to become her lover. She keeps her romantic life very private so there’s no way you could have known that she likes girls. I fell in love with her. Me. That was something that happened without any ulterior motive. I didn’t...it’s not like I blacked out for the entire time we were together for frak’s sake!”
Simon sighed as he walked over and handed her a bathrobe. “I hope all the sleepers aren’t like this.”
Gina pulled on the bathrobe in a huff and started to storm out of the room.
“Where are you going?” Simon called out to her.
She stopped and spoke over her shoulder, her tone icy. “What do you care? I’ve already done your dirty work.”
”What are you going to do now then?”
Gina laughed bitterly. “I have a strange craving for toast if you must know.”
She exited the room before he could ask her any more questions, and once the door was closed and he couldn’t see her anymore she leant up against the wall and buried her face in her hands. For all her angry words she didn’t have the faintest idea what she was going to do now. She still didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten here, and she regretted not asking Simon to properly explain the ‘resurrection’ thing he’d mentioned before she stormed out.
That said, she did not regret storming out. She was furious with the cylons for her very existence, and hated them for the hurt they’d caused both herself and Helena.
She heard a light cough and looked up, and a woman she’d never seen before smiled at her. “Just resurrected, huh? I’ve done it three times now and I still can’t get used to it. Come on, I’ll come with you to the showers.”
Gina pulled her face entirely out of her hands, and the woman’s eyes widened. “Oh, you’re that...oh. Well then, I’m an Eight and we’re on a resurrection ship at the moment.”
“Simon said that too, but I don’t know what that means.” Gina eyed her warily, angry with this ‘Eight’ purely because she was a cylon, but also curious to find out as much about them as she could. The information might come in handy in the future if she ever got a chance to ‘repay’ them for the gift of her human existence.
“Basically,” Eight explained, “when we die our thoughts and memories manage to transfer back - if there’s a resurrection ship close enough and thankfully there was - and they then download into a new body. See, same cylon but with a new and improved - and by improved I mean ‘not dead’ - cylon body. Resurrected.”
“Huh,” Gina inspected her wrists and then placed a hand over the right-hand side of her chest. “That would explain a lot.”
The Eight smiled at her and grabbed her wrist, and suddenly panic flared in Gina’s mind and she yanked the hand back. She held it against her chest and rubbed the area the Eight had touched with her other hand while shrinking back against the wall. She kept her eyes down but heard the Eight say “Ooookay, I’m guessing you didn’t go prettily then.”
“I...I just have issues with being touched right now” Gina replied, trying to calm herself. She was certain the Eight intended her no harm, but just being grabbed like that had instantly triggered intense fear in her, and she’d reacted without thinking. She’d thought this resurrection thing had cured her of the ill effects of the torture, but apparently the mental trauma was still there. From only a couple of days of it, too, and she was glad that she got out when she did.
She forced a smile onto her face as she was uncertain how the cylons would react to one of their own showing weaknesses.
“I’m okay. First time being, ah, resurrected, that’s all. Now, you said something about showers?”
The Eight nodded to her left, and the two of them started walking through the corridors. Like the first room she’d woken up in, these areas were dark as well. A red light ran through the centre of the walls, and its resemblance to the red eye of the cylon centurions she’d seen on the Pegasus made her shiver. She didn’t understand how anyone could stand being in a place like this for a long period of time. The corridors of the Pegasus were much nicer, and the lighting wasn’t disorienting the way the resurrection ship was. She sighed softly and wished that this was all just a dream and she were actually still on the Pegasus (though not in the brig), and then the walls suddenly shifted around her. She yelped and jumped back when she suddenly found herself standing in the familiar corridors of the Battlestar Pegasus.
The Eight turned at the noise and walked over to Gina, and Gina gaped at the fact that she hadn’t noticed that the walls had changed.
“What’s the matter?” Eight asked with a worried expression on her face, and Gina pointed in all directions at once.
“The walls...the walls” she stammered repeatedly, worrying that she was going mad again.
Eight looked confused for a moment before her eyes opened wide in sudden realisation. “Oh, you’re just now learning how to project, aren’t you?”
Gina gave her a blank look, and the Eight continued. “Cylons are able to basically project any surrounding they wish onto their current location, and see it as if they were there. I’m currently seeing the fields of Picon, which is where I was living before the first attacks. Damn nuke got me of course. How about you? What did you see?”
“The streets of Scorpia,” Gina lied, “I was just thinking about how glad I was to not have to provide technical support to my elderly neighbour anymore.”
Eight laughed and continued leading them through what Gina was still seeing as the corridors of the Pegasus. “That must’ve been horrible. I was lucky; I didn’t have to spend much time with the humans. I just travelled around the colony to document the best areas to nuke. Which part of town was going to be most crowded at a particular time of day, that sort of thing.”
As she had her back to Gina she missed the glare Gina was throwing at her. Now she knew that she was very different to the other cylons, as she could never talk so casually about genocide. The anger reassured her in its way, as it showed her that regardless of how she’d come into being she was still her own person with her own thoughts and emotions. They couldn’t just ‘switch her on’ and expect that to kill the woman she was.
Still, that didn’t change the fact that she was a cylon, and the crew of the Pegasus had made it abundantly clear that they didn’t care whether she knew she was a cylon or not. With this thought the walls of the Pegasus faded and she once again found herself in the dark corridors of the resurrection ship.
Why? Why hadn’t Helena given her a chance to explain? If Helena truly loved her she would have been in as much denial about her cylon nature as Gina herself had been.
Gina stubbornly pushed those thoughts away. She couldn't afford to think like that; she couldn’t let go of the hope that Helena would understand once she’d had a chance to explain herself. Without that to sustain her there was nothing left but despair and anger.
“We’re here!” Eight announced, and opened the door for her. Gina gasped as she entered the room and saw it packed with...with herself.
“It’s the scheduled time for the Sixes in here,” one of them told Eight, “you’ll get your turn later on.”
“I’m not staying,” replied Eight, “I’m just dropping off this Six who just resurrected.”
It took Gina a moment to register that ‘this Six’ referred to herself.
“Be nice to her; she was a sleeper agent.” Eight waved a farewell to Gina and then left the room. Gina continued to stare in stunned silence at the many women who walked around with her face. The hair varied from woman to woman, but aside from that they were identical to her. Seeing the first cylon in the Pegasus was a big enough shock; this was something else entirely.
“Oh, you were the one on that Battlestar.” One of the women with brown hair stepped forward with a hand raised as if she were going to place it on Gina’s shoulder, but she ducked back and darted across to one of the empty cubicles.
“Sorry, I’m still sticky from that goo in the tub earlier. I’d really like to get all washed up” she called through the door, and then removed her bathrobe and hung it on a hook. She sighed happily as she turned the water on and felt it run over her body. It was the first thing to go right in a long while, and despite everything she still loved her warm showers. She ran her fingers through her hair, and paused before repeating the motion. Was her hair shorter than usual?
A knock on the door distracted her, and a voice called through “I fetched you some clothes. I’m sliding them through on a tray under the door, all right?”
Gina called back a thank you, and then returned to letting the water run over her, allowing her mind to go blank. The wonderful thing about showers was the fact that for a short while the outside world couldn’t affect you, and you could pretend that nothing else existed. Time continued but was somehow on hold until you took that step outside the door. Gina delayed turning off the water for as long as she could, but eventually there was another knock on her door.
“You should probably get out soon. The Threes are scheduled for the showers next, and they won’t be too happy if they have to wait.”
Gina resisted the urge to snap that the Threes could go frak themselves, and with a deep sigh she turned off the water. After drying herself with the bathrobe she slipped into the clothes that had been passed through for her. They fit perfectly, of course, and consisted of tight black pants and a blue-grey sleeveless shirt that was almost the same shade as her Integral Systems Engineering coat. She smiled humourlessly, and then took a deep breath before she stepped outside.
A Six with the same curly platinum blonde hair the woman in the Pegasus had had passed her a blow-dryer, and Gina smiled a weak thank you. The few mirrors in there were being taken up by other Sixes (it was easy enough to think of these women as just ‘Sixes’, but it was still very hard to include herself in that bunch) so she stood off to the side to dry her hair.
By the time she’d finished a mirror had been vacated, and she did a double take as she caught sight of her reflection in it.
She’d been right in the shower earlier; her hair was shorter. It was curlier, too. In fact, it was identical to the platinum blonde hair the majority of other women in the room had. She tugged on a curl with a distressed look on her face, and for the first time she looked at herself and thought ‘cylon!’
She could see the brunette Six who’d first spoken to her walking up in the reflection, and she turned and tried to act naturally.
“It’s annoying, I know, but that’s the default hairstyle for our model. If you want to change to something different,” she tugged one of her own brown curls, “you’ll just have to dye it.”
“But I lived for...” Gina couldn’t give an exact measurement as she wasn’t entirely sure how many of her memories were false or real, “for a long while, and I never dyed my hair.”
“She says ‘dying’,” another Six interrupted, “but our process is more like altering code. Once you do it it’s permanent, until you want to move onto the next colour anyway.”
Gina made a mental note to get her hair changed back to the wavy darker blonde she was used to as soon as possible. The last thing she needed was to feel like she’d suddenly become a different person.
“So,” the Six who’d interrupted continued, “you have to tell us about the Pegasus. What was it like? What were the humans like? How did gain the trust of its commander?”
“Admiral Cain was the commander of the Battlestar Pegasus. I...we...she fell in love with me.”
The Sixes in the room all nodded at each other knowingly, and Gina’s voice grew softer as she said “she’s still in love with me.”
“Is she now?” A male voice spoke from behind her, and Gina spun around to the entrance of the showers where an older man with grey hair was standing.
“Hello...Gina, was it? Gina, I think you and I should have a little talk.”
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Author note: Yay, another bit I've had planned for a long while comes out. =D When I sat down to think about what would actually be changed by Gina being a sleeper agent I realised that suicide isn't a sin with the human gods which she'd believe in. Hey presto, we have storyline deviation!
Chapter Thirteen
Author: phoenixstorm
Pairing: Cain/Gina
Rating: PG-13
Warning: A smidge of violence, vaguely implied rape.
Word Count: 5,056
Summary: What if Gina were a sleeper agent cylon?
( Summary page here if you're new to the fic.)
Chapter Twelve:
Thorne walked straight for Gina, his boots thumping heavily on the metal floor. One, two, three. On the fourth beat he bent so that he was face to face with Gina, and his right hand snapped out to grab her chin. He seemed completely oblivious to Helena and Gina forced herself to keep her eyes on his, fighting the powerful urge to look away and see if the admiral was going to attempt anything.
A flash of movement caught her attention and her eyes betrayed her, darting away from Thorne’s to peer over his shoulder. She snapped them straight back, but he’d already seen what she’d done. With a frown he started to turn but as he did so Helena’s hands were at his waist, and when he was only half way around Helena had managed to get the gun out and had it pressed to the back of his neck.
“You do not want to frak with me, toaster.” She warned him, and pressed the gun down harder. Gina’s breath caught in her throat as she watched Thorne tense up rather than relaxing the way she’d been hoping he would. Helena had been right about him.
“Last warning,” Helena’s words were sharp and with emphasis, “surrender and release us.”
Thorne closed his eyes and Gina started to inhale, but before she could manage a sigh of relief Thorne was moving, there was a gunshot, and then blood splattered across her face. She blinked in confusion as she watched Thorne’s body drop to the ground, and then she could see Helena again. She had a cold look on her face as she held her position for a moment, then she dropped the weapon and started sorting through Thorne’s pockets. Gina turned her head and tried to wipe some of the blood on her cheek off onto her shoulder, and wasn’t having much luck with that when she heard a light jingle and turned back to Helena who was holding what Gina hoped were the keys to her gods-cursed cuffs.
Helena undid the ones around her ankles first, and then walked over to remove the cuffs that had been binding Gina’s wrists and ankles for what seemed like an eternity now. With her arms finally free the first thing Gina did was throw them around Helena’s neck and pull her in for a quick embrace, but she knew that they didn’t have much time to spare so she let go quickly and then jumped to her feet. She grabbed Thorne’s gun from the floor and walked quickly to the entrance to their cell.
“It looks like the coast is clear, we should be able to...” Gina paused as she suddenly realised what she’d just done. She’d been kept in the same cramped sitting position for days now, and she’d jumped to her feet and walked over here with stumbling in the slightest. She could feel the ache in her legs and feel that they were both asleep, and yet she was walking as if she were completely fine. Her eyes shifted to the gun in her hands, and she gasped a little to realise that she was holding it as if she actually knew what she was doing.
Gina turned back to Helena, her lips parted as she shook her head slowly. It suddenly became a little difficult for her to breathe. She’d been fighting the knowledge for so long now, but blindly believing everything Helena told her without thinking wasn't working for her anymore. There was no logical reason to explain this away. None, except for...
I open my eyes, really open my eyes for the first time in a while. My face is being pushed into the ground by his boot on my head, and I know now. I know that this is my reality. It’s been my reality all along, and the realisation hurts more than the fact that it feels as if he’s about to crush my skull.
Helena’s not here with me. No one’s going to rescue me. I’m a cylon.
Admitting that to myself isn’t as hard as I’d have thought, but the pain has brought on a strange new sense of apathy. My memories may be false, my ‘people’ may have wiped out almost all of humanity, but I just can’t find it within myself to care.
Even with the apathy I still know that I don’t want this, and even if the other place is false I was still much happier there. If I can just manage to concentrate I may be able to...
Gina looked down at herself and smiled bitterly upon noticing that she was now in her standard clothes, complete with Integral Systems Engineering coat. If she was going to be in a false reality she might as well be rid of that horrible, scratchy dress.
“Gina, we don’t have much time.” Helena gripped her shoulder and the two of them left the cell. The sight of Helena, her false Helena, made Gina’s eyes start to water up. It upset her that the woman in front of her wasn’t real, but even more upsetting was the fact that she didn’t care. Reality or fiction, she just wanted to be with the woman she loved.
They checked the entrance to the brig carefully and then took cautious steps outside. Gina followed Helena’s lead even though she knew no one was going to find them, and tried to keep her attention focused on the brown hair and blue uniform she saw walking ahead of her. Without the complete conviction that this world was real it was getting harder for Gina to maintain it, especially since she was almost completely drained emotionally. Thorne’s visits had caused her a great deal of physical pain, and to cope she’d succumbed to what she could only call madness. Without that she now realised just how much Thorne had been mentally torturing her as well.
It started to eat into her fantasy world. Panels on the walls would blink in and out of existence and the length of the corridors kept changing, but still Helena was in front of her in perfect focus, and still Gina followed her.
It was hard to say how many corridors they’d walked down exactly, and when the walls started to get blurry as well Gina finally called out to Helena.
“I’m so tired,” she whispered when Helena had come back to check on her, and she closed her eyes to lean into the hand that was placed on her cheek.
“It’s okay Gina, we’re here.” Helena’s voice was soft and reassuring, and it gave Gina the strength to open her eyes and see the docking bay and the Raptor right in front of them. Its shape kept shifting but it was there, and Helena helped Gina up and sat her down in one of the seats. She sat there gasping for breath as Helena launched the Raptor into space, and when they were flying smoothly she came back to take the seat next to Gina.
”Where are we going?” Gina asked, letting her head fall down onto Helena’s shoulder.
A hand stroked Gina’s head. “We’re not going anywhere,” Helena said, and there was regret in her voice, “it would be too hard on you, so I’ve killed the engines. We’re just drifting.”
Gina chuckled softly. “Just like that story Lynelle told. Why did you do that to those two pilots?”
She was forced to open her eyes again when Helena turned and pulled her face up. “I’m not going to answer that,” she said, “because the real Helena never told you and I don’t want to tell you anything that’s not true.”
Her words caused Gina’s chest to tighten, and suddenly she was wrapping her arms around Helena and sobbing harder than she had before.
“I don’t want this to be the false world,” she cried out between gasped breaths, “I love you.”
“I love you, too.” Helena held her tightly and rubbed her back, and Gina’s sobs managed to fade as she laughed bitterly.
“I thought you said you wouldn’t tell me anything that wasn’t true.”
The jumping walls of the Raptor disappeared completely and she was left in a white space with Helena, who buried her fingers in Gina’s hair and then pulled her in for a kiss. Gina savoured it for as long as she could, but eventually she opened her eyes and saw the walls of her cell again, and a tear travelled down her cheek as Helena’s last words echoed in her head.
“But it is true. That’s the problem...”
She could hear Thorne zipping up his pants and refastening his belt, and then he pulled her up into a sitting position by her hair.
“You’d have to agree that I’ve been easy on you up until now, but the admiral is starting to get frustrated by my lack of results.” He bent to speak into her ear, then leaned back up and walked around so that he was standing about two metres in front of her. Gina watched him, consumed by the apathy again which at least allowed her to stare him in the eyes without flinching or looking away.
She just wanted this to end. She could no longer pretend that this wasn’t real and she no longer had the strength to pretend at all. All she had to look forward to in the future was pain, and more pain, and more pain. Some frakking machine she was. She vaguely wondered if the other human cylons would break under this kind of pressure, but once again she found that she didn’t care.
Zeus, Hera, Athena, she started to pray. Apollo, Artemis, Demeter, Ares, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Hades.
She blinked, turning her attention away from Thorne for a moment.
Hades, Hades. Of course. She knew what she had to do now.
Thorne was speaking again. “I think I’m going to have to try something new in order to get a response out of you.”
He removed his sidearm from his waist and aimed it at Gina’s right shoulder. She watched the barrel, hoping to the gods that cylons had better reflexes than humans.
“Every time I ask you a question and you don’t respond you get a hole. Now, tell me how many cylons there are out there.”
“Seventy-five frakking billion” she spat out, and Thorne shook his head at her.
“The only thing I like less than no response is a stupid response.” His finger tightened around the trigger and Gina was able to shift ever so slightly to the right before the bullet connected. However, the bullet didn’t hit her shoulder as Thorne has intended, but instead hit her above her right breast, puncturing a lung.
She collapsed to the ground gasping, feeling a sharp pain with every small breath. The bullet must have sent shards of rib into her lung as well, but even though this hurt far more than anything Thorne had caused her to endure earlier she still pulled her lips back into a pained but triumphant smile. Thorne saw it and swore, and ran out of the cell to the phone at the wall. Gina curled into a ball as she coughed up blood and watched him talking into the phone, her vision starting to go white at the corners. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but from the look on his face he seemed to be having an argument with someone. A chuckle brought up more blood as she realised that the ship’s doctor probably wasn’t too keen on the thought of holding off surgery on recovering crew members so that he could save some cylon. This couldn’t have gone better.
At some point Thorne slammed down the phone and looked back at her with his own version of triumph, but she didn’t have the energy to respond. Gina’s body still tried to draw in the short and sharp gasps of air that it could, and as her vision was starting to go entirely she spotted movement at the entrance to the brig which must have been the doctors or nurses coming to try and save her at last. She wasn’t worried though as she could feel herself slipping away.
Her suicide would be complete. Finally this nightmare would end.
Her eyelids fluttered shut.
---
A loud noise shocked her and a voice in Gina’s head screamed I can’t breathe! She threw herself upwards and thrashed around for a handhold so that she could keep herself upright. She leaned against the metal to her side and gasped in many deep breaths, her eyes closed as she savoured the air in her pain-free lungs.
When Gina had finally gotten her fill it suddenly dawned on her that she was submerged in a strangely thick liquid, and for the first time in days was able to move her arms. She lifted up her hands in front of her face, reminding herself what they actually looked like, and then as a final shock she discovered that she was also naked.
What was going on? Had the humans managed to save her after all? But where was she? She’d never seen any place like this before and she was fairly certain she’d seen all the Pegasus had to offer.
Something dropped on her head and obscured her vision, and when she reached up to remove the towel she spotted a very familiar face.
“Simon?” she cried in disbelief, knowing that her mouth was hanging open and not caring.
Simon smiled at her as he knelt down beside the tub Gina was currently submerged in. “Hello Gina,” he said in the same old voice she remembered from months ago, “I knew we’d meet again though I was hoping they’d be under different circumstances. I hope you don’t mind my asking how you died?”
“Died..?” Gina repeated, not remembering for a moment. Then, like a tidal wave, her last moments came back to her. The woman she loved had ordered her torture, and unable to endure it anymore she had moved so that her torturer’s bullet had stuck something vital rather than just her shoulder. She’d died in that cell, gasping for breath as her insides were ripped apart. So how could she be...wherever she was?
“Oh!” She exclaimed as she figured it out, “they...the humans I suppose, they got me to surgery on time and saved me, and now I’m mad and creating fantasy worlds again.”
Simon tilted his head and gave her the sympathetic look one gives a fool. “No, Gina, you died and downloaded back here in this resurrection ship. Since you said ‘the humans’ I’m assuming you switched on all right, so how could you not know about resurrection?”
“Resurrection?” She repeated him again, then raised a hand to her face and rubbed her forehead. “Inviere, resurrection, that frakking Lieutenant Shaw.”
Her head was pounding while trying to understand all of this. With the apathy gone she was starting to freak out again over the fact that she was a cylon, and apparently she had died and ‘resurrected’ now. Gina pulled the hand away to take a good look at the room she was in. It was mostly dark though the bright lights from the tub she was in were blinding her. The thick, almost glue-like substance she was in wasn’t helping her with this strange situation at all, so she pulled herself out of the tub and started to dry herself off with the towel Simon had given her.
Simon laughed at the sight. “You could have waited until I was gone. Sleeper agent or no, you’re as shameless as the rest of the Sixes.”
She ignored the dig, but then her head snapped over in his direction as she pieced together something else. On top of trying to deal with everything that had been happening to her she hadn’t wondered for a second what was going on with him.
“Simon...assuming that this isn’t another fantasy world and I’m not entirely convinced of that yet...are you a cylon as well?”
He managed to hold in this laugh and nodded instead. “I’m one of the fourth model cylons, but I was always awake. You were programmed to think that you were human because you were intended to go onto the Battlestar Pegasus, and even though your model are exceptional actresses the Ones felt that they didn’t want to risk someone like Admiral Cain becoming suspicious of our plans.”
Gina stopped drying herself and clenched her hands into fists around the towel. “You...you...’didn’t want to risk it?’ You did this to me because you thought Helena might clue on to the fact that you’re trying to wipe out her entire species? You made me think I was human, gave me an entire history so that you could use me to betray the woman I love?”
“Gina, Gina, you can’t love her. You were programmed to gain her trust, that’s all.”
“Which I could have done simply by being good at my job!” Gina yelled at him, throwing the towel in his face as hard as she could. “But I’ll bet you never said I had to become her lover. She keeps her romantic life very private so there’s no way you could have known that she likes girls. I fell in love with her. Me. That was something that happened without any ulterior motive. I didn’t...it’s not like I blacked out for the entire time we were together for frak’s sake!”
Simon sighed as he walked over and handed her a bathrobe. “I hope all the sleepers aren’t like this.”
Gina pulled on the bathrobe in a huff and started to storm out of the room.
“Where are you going?” Simon called out to her.
She stopped and spoke over her shoulder, her tone icy. “What do you care? I’ve already done your dirty work.”
”What are you going to do now then?”
Gina laughed bitterly. “I have a strange craving for toast if you must know.”
She exited the room before he could ask her any more questions, and once the door was closed and he couldn’t see her anymore she leant up against the wall and buried her face in her hands. For all her angry words she didn’t have the faintest idea what she was going to do now. She still didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten here, and she regretted not asking Simon to properly explain the ‘resurrection’ thing he’d mentioned before she stormed out.
That said, she did not regret storming out. She was furious with the cylons for her very existence, and hated them for the hurt they’d caused both herself and Helena.
She heard a light cough and looked up, and a woman she’d never seen before smiled at her. “Just resurrected, huh? I’ve done it three times now and I still can’t get used to it. Come on, I’ll come with you to the showers.”
Gina pulled her face entirely out of her hands, and the woman’s eyes widened. “Oh, you’re that...oh. Well then, I’m an Eight and we’re on a resurrection ship at the moment.”
“Simon said that too, but I don’t know what that means.” Gina eyed her warily, angry with this ‘Eight’ purely because she was a cylon, but also curious to find out as much about them as she could. The information might come in handy in the future if she ever got a chance to ‘repay’ them for the gift of her human existence.
“Basically,” Eight explained, “when we die our thoughts and memories manage to transfer back - if there’s a resurrection ship close enough and thankfully there was - and they then download into a new body. See, same cylon but with a new and improved - and by improved I mean ‘not dead’ - cylon body. Resurrected.”
“Huh,” Gina inspected her wrists and then placed a hand over the right-hand side of her chest. “That would explain a lot.”
The Eight smiled at her and grabbed her wrist, and suddenly panic flared in Gina’s mind and she yanked the hand back. She held it against her chest and rubbed the area the Eight had touched with her other hand while shrinking back against the wall. She kept her eyes down but heard the Eight say “Ooookay, I’m guessing you didn’t go prettily then.”
“I...I just have issues with being touched right now” Gina replied, trying to calm herself. She was certain the Eight intended her no harm, but just being grabbed like that had instantly triggered intense fear in her, and she’d reacted without thinking. She’d thought this resurrection thing had cured her of the ill effects of the torture, but apparently the mental trauma was still there. From only a couple of days of it, too, and she was glad that she got out when she did.
She forced a smile onto her face as she was uncertain how the cylons would react to one of their own showing weaknesses.
“I’m okay. First time being, ah, resurrected, that’s all. Now, you said something about showers?”
The Eight nodded to her left, and the two of them started walking through the corridors. Like the first room she’d woken up in, these areas were dark as well. A red light ran through the centre of the walls, and its resemblance to the red eye of the cylon centurions she’d seen on the Pegasus made her shiver. She didn’t understand how anyone could stand being in a place like this for a long period of time. The corridors of the Pegasus were much nicer, and the lighting wasn’t disorienting the way the resurrection ship was. She sighed softly and wished that this was all just a dream and she were actually still on the Pegasus (though not in the brig), and then the walls suddenly shifted around her. She yelped and jumped back when she suddenly found herself standing in the familiar corridors of the Battlestar Pegasus.
The Eight turned at the noise and walked over to Gina, and Gina gaped at the fact that she hadn’t noticed that the walls had changed.
“What’s the matter?” Eight asked with a worried expression on her face, and Gina pointed in all directions at once.
“The walls...the walls” she stammered repeatedly, worrying that she was going mad again.
Eight looked confused for a moment before her eyes opened wide in sudden realisation. “Oh, you’re just now learning how to project, aren’t you?”
Gina gave her a blank look, and the Eight continued. “Cylons are able to basically project any surrounding they wish onto their current location, and see it as if they were there. I’m currently seeing the fields of Picon, which is where I was living before the first attacks. Damn nuke got me of course. How about you? What did you see?”
“The streets of Scorpia,” Gina lied, “I was just thinking about how glad I was to not have to provide technical support to my elderly neighbour anymore.”
Eight laughed and continued leading them through what Gina was still seeing as the corridors of the Pegasus. “That must’ve been horrible. I was lucky; I didn’t have to spend much time with the humans. I just travelled around the colony to document the best areas to nuke. Which part of town was going to be most crowded at a particular time of day, that sort of thing.”
As she had her back to Gina she missed the glare Gina was throwing at her. Now she knew that she was very different to the other cylons, as she could never talk so casually about genocide. The anger reassured her in its way, as it showed her that regardless of how she’d come into being she was still her own person with her own thoughts and emotions. They couldn’t just ‘switch her on’ and expect that to kill the woman she was.
Still, that didn’t change the fact that she was a cylon, and the crew of the Pegasus had made it abundantly clear that they didn’t care whether she knew she was a cylon or not. With this thought the walls of the Pegasus faded and she once again found herself in the dark corridors of the resurrection ship.
Why? Why hadn’t Helena given her a chance to explain? If Helena truly loved her she would have been in as much denial about her cylon nature as Gina herself had been.
Gina stubbornly pushed those thoughts away. She couldn't afford to think like that; she couldn’t let go of the hope that Helena would understand once she’d had a chance to explain herself. Without that to sustain her there was nothing left but despair and anger.
“We’re here!” Eight announced, and opened the door for her. Gina gasped as she entered the room and saw it packed with...with herself.
“It’s the scheduled time for the Sixes in here,” one of them told Eight, “you’ll get your turn later on.”
“I’m not staying,” replied Eight, “I’m just dropping off this Six who just resurrected.”
It took Gina a moment to register that ‘this Six’ referred to herself.
“Be nice to her; she was a sleeper agent.” Eight waved a farewell to Gina and then left the room. Gina continued to stare in stunned silence at the many women who walked around with her face. The hair varied from woman to woman, but aside from that they were identical to her. Seeing the first cylon in the Pegasus was a big enough shock; this was something else entirely.
“Oh, you were the one on that Battlestar.” One of the women with brown hair stepped forward with a hand raised as if she were going to place it on Gina’s shoulder, but she ducked back and darted across to one of the empty cubicles.
“Sorry, I’m still sticky from that goo in the tub earlier. I’d really like to get all washed up” she called through the door, and then removed her bathrobe and hung it on a hook. She sighed happily as she turned the water on and felt it run over her body. It was the first thing to go right in a long while, and despite everything she still loved her warm showers. She ran her fingers through her hair, and paused before repeating the motion. Was her hair shorter than usual?
A knock on the door distracted her, and a voice called through “I fetched you some clothes. I’m sliding them through on a tray under the door, all right?”
Gina called back a thank you, and then returned to letting the water run over her, allowing her mind to go blank. The wonderful thing about showers was the fact that for a short while the outside world couldn’t affect you, and you could pretend that nothing else existed. Time continued but was somehow on hold until you took that step outside the door. Gina delayed turning off the water for as long as she could, but eventually there was another knock on her door.
“You should probably get out soon. The Threes are scheduled for the showers next, and they won’t be too happy if they have to wait.”
Gina resisted the urge to snap that the Threes could go frak themselves, and with a deep sigh she turned off the water. After drying herself with the bathrobe she slipped into the clothes that had been passed through for her. They fit perfectly, of course, and consisted of tight black pants and a blue-grey sleeveless shirt that was almost the same shade as her Integral Systems Engineering coat. She smiled humourlessly, and then took a deep breath before she stepped outside.
A Six with the same curly platinum blonde hair the woman in the Pegasus had had passed her a blow-dryer, and Gina smiled a weak thank you. The few mirrors in there were being taken up by other Sixes (it was easy enough to think of these women as just ‘Sixes’, but it was still very hard to include herself in that bunch) so she stood off to the side to dry her hair.
By the time she’d finished a mirror had been vacated, and she did a double take as she caught sight of her reflection in it.
She’d been right in the shower earlier; her hair was shorter. It was curlier, too. In fact, it was identical to the platinum blonde hair the majority of other women in the room had. She tugged on a curl with a distressed look on her face, and for the first time she looked at herself and thought ‘cylon!’
She could see the brunette Six who’d first spoken to her walking up in the reflection, and she turned and tried to act naturally.
“It’s annoying, I know, but that’s the default hairstyle for our model. If you want to change to something different,” she tugged one of her own brown curls, “you’ll just have to dye it.”
“But I lived for...” Gina couldn’t give an exact measurement as she wasn’t entirely sure how many of her memories were false or real, “for a long while, and I never dyed my hair.”
“She says ‘dying’,” another Six interrupted, “but our process is more like altering code. Once you do it it’s permanent, until you want to move onto the next colour anyway.”
Gina made a mental note to get her hair changed back to the wavy darker blonde she was used to as soon as possible. The last thing she needed was to feel like she’d suddenly become a different person.
“So,” the Six who’d interrupted continued, “you have to tell us about the Pegasus. What was it like? What were the humans like? How did gain the trust of its commander?”
“Admiral Cain was the commander of the Battlestar Pegasus. I...we...she fell in love with me.”
The Sixes in the room all nodded at each other knowingly, and Gina’s voice grew softer as she said “she’s still in love with me.”
“Is she now?” A male voice spoke from behind her, and Gina spun around to the entrance of the showers where an older man with grey hair was standing.
“Hello...Gina, was it? Gina, I think you and I should have a little talk.”
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Author note: Yay, another bit I've had planned for a long while comes out. =D When I sat down to think about what would actually be changed by Gina being a sleeper agent I realised that suicide isn't a sin with the human gods which she'd believe in. Hey presto, we have storyline deviation!
Chapter Thirteen